


Bright Shiners

by arioso_dolente



Category: Old Kingdom - Garth Nix
Genre: Bells, Death, Free Verse, Gen, Music, POV Second Person, Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-17
Updated: 2016-04-29
Packaged: 2018-05-27 06:19:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6273136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arioso_dolente/pseuds/arioso_dolente
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dialogues among the Seven, rendered in verse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Sleeper

How does it feel  
to be so silvery, small  
yet permanent?

You, youngest, gentle, ever-forgiving,  
underlie all that lives not with inevitability,  
but rather sisterly concern.  
You are that first whisper  
trickling into the edges of the mind,  
dulling pain and anxiety,  
first enticing,  
then imploring  
with a single sweet chime.  
You slip between the seams  
of all that lives and grows,  
washing between sighs,  
breaths,  
riding trails of weariness and despair,  
unassuming and soft,  
entreating just one  
descending word:  
_Rest._

You intone it,  
and all the world fades away,  
warriors, writers,  
all that listen  
(and most that don’t)  
fall into warm, inviting dark.


	2. Waker

You were always a contrary one.

I suppose you do that to remind the rest of us,  
when we grow too enmeshed in our own minutiae,  
when we are too comfortably oblivious  
to pain no more our own.  
Yours is the klaxon call,  
the strident insistence that  
_what is lost is not forgotten._  
So when the sleeper stirs from unsettled dreams,  
troubled, plagued with  
injustice, old resentments,  
things left unsaid—  
your cry seeks to right it,  
even if it must ruin the rest of us to do it.  
Thus it happens,  
when bones are violently cast into the earth,  
buried before any protest can utter,  
you appear,  
sounding the alarum to all who walk,  
shattering the ignorance of the night.


	3. Walker

Another rebel, you.  
You like to congregate together,  
share your disobedience with each other,  
run carelessly into the excuse of darkness.  
One wakes,  
another walks,  
two co-conspirators in insomnia.  
Is it any wonder you two are such friends?

Yet you have your own ideas,  
your secret paths to tread,  
dragging along any who will listen.  
Your reputation suffers for it,  
but you care not for esteem,  
not when there are new mysteries to explore,  
scents to trace and unbury,  
stories to thrust into the light again.

You might help, or hinder,  
(it depends on your mood, there’s your own goal to consider)  
but only you will ever know which is which,  
and so you will reach the farthest in your travels,  
though it’s never certain where those will lead.


	4. Speaker

If any can be called silver-tongued,  
it is surely you.

You are the paragon,  
your tune polished, refined,  
and yet—

it carries that hollowness of insincerity.

So while you are praised for the sweetest voice  
(and it is, mellifluous and melismatic, trickling like birdsong)  
there is still something in it the listener cannot trust.

 _I advocate,_ you protest,  
 _I speak for those exhausted of words._  
This may be, and yet  
we must wonder what secrets your words conceal.  
The silent have such little use for subterfuge;  
what agenda can come without language to bear it?  
But what you paint with your gleaming notes leaves  
holes in the rests between them,  
draws the ear away from what it least wants to know.

It is fitting, then,  
that you turn against the careless listener—  
logical, that you who can shape a melody in both sound and its lack  
can so easily staunch one at the source,  
mute a tongue and  
silence dissent with the casual arrogance  
of an authority.


	5. Thinker

It’s always messy when they start thinking  
(you’d know, better than the rest).

You’re dangerously independent too,  
if in a different way from your louder kin.  
You ask, _why—?_  
(that question everyone least wants to hear)  
and suddenly all is hampered in complications.  
Your music stops and starts,  
never sticking to one meter,  
stuttering fickly from stillness  
to sudden diminution.  
It begins always calculated, always considering  
its own themes and motives—  
until that inevitable point when it  
abandons them to start afresh.

It’s hard to pin anything down with you,  
since even in sleep we still dream.  
So you dream,  
your mind flitting idly, unconscious,  
unable to pause, or even choose its direction,  
scattering melodies to the wind.


	6. Binder

But here you come,  
because someone must say, at some point,  
 _This is how it must be._

 _It is all well enough,  
_ you remind with patient placidity,  
 _to wake, to advocate, to_ remember—  
 _but there is still an order to follow._  
Your voice is carefully reasoned, bound in law,  
perhaps not as sweet,  
but no less steadily consonant for all that.  
Of your kind,  
you are among the loudest,  
but also the most consistently in tune.  
That dependability reassures—  
but we cannot pretend it doesn’t chafe.  
Why this order? we ask you;  
who decreed that all motion must lie again in rest?

We ask this of you,  
but your answer is always the same:  
 _Because._  
Your low hum permeates our universe,  
the root beneath our discord,  
to which we must return, always,  
to unison.


	7. Weeper

You are the last,  
the final parting,  
the one severed from your siblings,  
the one they never understood.

 _These dialogues are pretty,_ you say to them with casual disdain,  
 _well-studied,  
_ _bound by law and reason,  
_ _and then dolled up in art and song.  
_ With a sneer, you rebuke them:  
 _Why would you not dress up death in poetry?  
_ _Give it fanciful names, perhaps,  
_ _invent personalities for it,  
_ _come up with elegant rationalizations for its existence,  
_ _call it beautiful, sublime,  
_ _sing the glory of its tragedy?  
_ _You only do this to remove yourselves from it._  
You would know this.  
You were always the odd one out.

 _Banality_ , you sing,  
 _blood,  
_ _these are the only truths in death.  
_ Your cry is not sweet or reasoned or any of the rest of it.  
You sing pain.  
It is the only truth you know.  
 _Death,_ you sing,  
 _see, how I at least am willing to say the word._

What you sing,  
what they will hear,  
is that awkward, yawning  
chasm of grief  
that swallows itself into nothing.  
What you sing  
is loud and magnetic and strangely profane,  
the inappropriate wailing  
that contagiously sweeps all listeners  
into its abyss,  
into final choking silence.


End file.
